Home » Poems » Harry W. Holloway » Remember Us As Smoke

Remember Us As Smoke

It’s a highway nightmare, or it should be,
but no one’s afraid (too much)
and the road just thunders and hummmms
on and on and on and on
under that greedy summer sun.

All of their guns are cocked and loaded
but we’re still wondering:
	Water or bullets?
	Joke or truth?
	Which is which?
I’m starting to like that you can never be sure
if that’s water or mortality dripping
from their barrels,
from their thumb-tacked smiles.

Then there’s us.
We live in the realm of
nonsense and secrets and
pure dangerlust.
I think it’s the hint
of the war zone in you
that keeps me in this.

You see,
I was born on a battlefield,
in the gunsmoke and sulfur
and dirt and lead;
I was raised in a war zone,
where I scrabbled for a wisp of meaning
among scores of hardened soldiers
(but mostly,
among the ones who had
no choice, 	no love, no fight).

I was forged in violence.

I belong in your
dark,whirling,unforgettable,deep
madness.
You’re a manifestation of trenches and dust,
of rubble and the cold thrill of martyrdom,
and I fit as a toy soldier
(too much truth there)
on the board of a child’s game.

Maybe real people
don’t fit together quite like we do,
but I’d rather be the
blistered pig iron ideal of a vagabond
than some shadow still hopelessly searching
for something that’s not there.

At the end is a firefight of old Hollywood proportions,
but I’m combat-ready and you’re battle-eager,
so let’s stop pretending that we don’t love this anymore.
(because I do I do I love it more than you)
We’ll keep writhing in the dark
until our time is up, but let’s see if
before we fizzle out, maybe we can
take a few of them down with us.

Fight me and love me,
don’t you ever settle
for an armistice, a cowardly end;
not if you want to go out as binary stars
or conjoined twins,
held together not by gravity or skin
but by the struggle to be
the triumphant,
the blood-soaked and victory-stained
godskingsheroesgenerals
of this whole affair.

So I won’t listen when they
say that this is all just something we’ve created
in our heads.
(If war is the opposite of creation,
how could we create one?
When matter and anti-matter
collide,
the only output is mutual annihilation.
Does that make us
n o t h i n g?)

We’re pushing 120 in this
high-octane pipe-dream set on the stage
of the bitterly hopeful Midwest. I’ll play
Bonnie if you’ll be Clyde,
but really, 
I think we’re a second Genesis
that’s been penned as a high-speed chase. 

We will never be hit.
We will never be caught.
We will only win. 
win. 
win.

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